Preview: Our Top New Releases from August

Kanpur Khoofiya Pvt. Ltd
by Richa S. Mukherjee

Meet Mr Prachand Tripathi, private investigator and owner of Kanpur Khoofiya Pvt Ltd. Accustomed to tracking down missing pets and cheating lovers, he is about to have his world change completely when a new case requires him to tail actress Shailaja Kapoor. What seems like a simple request turns into a dramatic dive into her murky past, wading through which is not going to be easy. Or safe.
Soon, Prachand and his wife, and partner against crime, Vidya, fall under the glare of the police as Shailaja Kapoor is abducted right before their eyes. Now he must put his skills to the test before they become victims at the end of a dark and dangerous game.

Adulting
by Neharika Gupta

Social media manager and popular blogger Aisha is flirty and flamboyant … even as she battles personal demons that tell her she must stop eating if she wants to stay pretty.
Ruhi couldn’t be more different from her friend, Aisha. Working at Litracy Publishing, she feels grossly under-appreciated by the editor-in-chief, who happens to be her mother. What keeps her going are her own ambitions – and the handsome author, Tejas.
Best-selling novelist Tejas has a bad case of writer’s block. He leans on Ruhi for emotional support before getting enamoured by Aisha as he struggles to live up to everyone’s expectations, including his own.
Bold and unapologetic, this is a s tory of love and self-discovery, heartache and book launches.

Girl in White Cotton
by Avni Doshi

Antara has never understood her mother Tara’s decisions – walking out on her marriage to follow a guru, living on the streets like a beggar, shacking up with an unknown artist, rebelling against society’s expectations … But when Tara starts losing her memory, Antara searches for a way to make peace with their shared past, a past that haunts them both.
As she relives her childhood in Pune in the 1980s, her Catholic boarding school days in the hills of Maharashtra, and her years as a young artist in Bombay, Antara comes up against her own fears and neuroses, realizing she might not be so different from Tara after all.
Girl in White Cotton is a journey into shifting memories, altering identities and the subjective nature of truth. Tracing the fragile line between familial devotion and deception, Avni Doshi’s mesmerising debut novel will both surprise and unsettle you.

Call Me Al: The Hero’s Ha-Ha Journey
by Sheheryar Sheikh

Altamaash the entertainer misstepped on to history’s stage to become a politician and created a lifetime’s worth of chaos and destruction in Pakistan. Now exiled to a London mansion, abandoned even by sycophants, Al yearns to relive the glory days of his rise to power. But the old guard has passed, and the colonial hangover in his home country has almost disappeared. Democracy is taking root, and with it is coming a fragile stability to the Third World. In these times, Al’s desire for doing his best – what’s worst for the rest of us – flows into two acts of massive evil: one double-murder that shakes his own complacent party back to full attention; and a countrywide riot – the biggest the world has ever witnessed. Al orchestrates these while perched luxuriously in exile in the UK. Woe to the day when he returns to claim the bloodstained crown. But cometh the hour, cometh the man!
Sheheryar B. Sheikh’s new novel is a ripping roller coaster ride through shenanigans of subcontinental politics that will keep you riveted.

Karna: The Great Warrior
by Ranjit Desai & Vikrant Pande

‘Who am I?’ It was a question that had troubled him all his life. His whole life had seemed entangled in the answer. His dignity, his destination, his ambitions – they all seemed linked to that entanglement. The irony was that the truth, instead of liberating him, had made him rudderless. In the Mahabharata, Karna is known to be the only warrior who could match Arjuna. Born of a god and a mother who abandons him at birth, Karna is mistreated from birth. Rejected by Drona, taunted by Draupadi, insulted by his blood brothers, misunderstood by many and manipulated even by the gods, Karna is the classic tragic hero. In his novel Radheya, Ranjit Desai, the author of Marathi classics like Shriman Yogi and Swami, gives voice to the angst and loneliness of Karna. Translated into English for the first time, the novel brings to surface the many sides to Karna’s character: his compassionate nature, his hurt and hubris, the love for his wife, his allegiance to Duryodhana, and his complicated relationship with Krishna.

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